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U.N. Appeals for Aid to North Korea
By John M. Goshko
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 7, 1998; Page A09
In making its largest-ever appeal for help, the Rome-based WFP said it needs 657,972 metric tons of food to distribute to 7.5 million people in the months ahead. During 1997, the WFP gave food aid to 4.7 million North Koreans. The total population is about 23.2 million.
"We got through last year by the skin of our teeth and managed to avert a major disaster," Katherine Bertini, the WFP executive director, told a news conference in London. "The international community has been very generous, and we are calling on it to be more generous to prevent food shortages from becoming a famine."
Since 1995, North Korea has been beset by devastating floods followed by severe drought. These conditions, coupled with the inefficient controls on agriculture by the Pyongyang government, have created food shortages so severe that Bertini said people are forced to harvest seaweed and try to grow vegetables on roofs of houses.
The situation has been aggravated by Pyongyang's limited ability to buy food from outside sources and by enmity between North and South Korea. North Korea has tried to link participation in a Korean peninsula peace conference sought by South Korea and the United States to increased amounts of unrestricted food aid. South Korea has tried to use its aid contributions to obtain concessions from the north.
The United States has insisted that there should be no linkage between the two issues. Last year, Washington donated 170,000 metric tons of food worth about $50 million to North Korea, and State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said today that the United States "will carefully examine" the appeal.
Rubin said that North Korea has agreed to allow the World Food Program to open two satellite offices outside Pyongyang and to double the number of its monitors in the country, to 48, to ensure that the food goes to hungry civilians, not to the North Korean army.
"The demonstration that they're prepared to double the staff and open two more offices indicates that they are open to the kind of monitoring the WFP deems necessary," Rubin said.
Under its proposed new program, the WFP, which now offers help to all North Korean children under 6, would extend the cutoff to 12. It also would give food assistance to pregnant women, nursing mothers, disabled persons, hospital patients and certain categories of workers.
Although North Korea will need an estimated 4.61 million metric tons of food during 1998, official estimates say its own production will account for 2.66 million metric tons -- 1.52 million metric tons of rice and 1.14 metric tons of maize. It cannot close the shortfall with imports, which are expected to total about 700,000 tons of foodstuffs.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
